Hay Festival Beirut

Hay Festival launches the first festival in Beirut with a programme which brings the most exciting voices of contemporary culture to the city from 4-6 July 2012.

More than 50 authors, journalists, artists, bloggers and thinkers will gather next month for the first international
Hay Festival Beirut, to celebrate the sharing of stories and ideas.The three-day festival runs from 4-6 July at the Beirut Art Center and Zico House, supported by the British Council, Literature Across Frontiers and Google.

Hay Festival Beirut builds on the success of Beirut 39, which brought together 39 leading Arab authors under the age of 40 from the Middle East and North Africa in 2010. Some of these are returning this year, including Hyam Yared, Najwan Darwish, Mansoura Ez Eldin and Joumana Haddad. Other countries represented are Italy, Denmark, United Kingdom, Canada and Colombia.

Highlights of the festival include a discussion about literature with the celebrated French novelist Mathias Enard; Lebanese poet and novelist Abbas Baydoun on the role of writers in a sectarian society; a roundtable conversation about how war stories are conveyed with New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson, and Asne Seierstad, author of The Bookseller of Kabul; the prominent lawyer Nizar Saghieh on human rights; a discussion on how writers serve as witnesses to history with Syria’s Khaled Khalifa, Habib Selmi from Tunisia, Mansoura Ez Eldin from Egypt and Abbas Baydoun from Lebanon; the art of graphic novels with Zeina Abirached and Mazen Kerbaj; and exploring the secrets of writing with Paolo Giordano and Miguel Syjuco, who won respectively Italy and Asia’s top literary award.

Hay Festivals: For 25 years Hay Festival has celebrated great writing from poets and scientists, lyricists and comedians, novelists and environmentalists from all over the world. It now runs 15 festivals across five continents, emphasizing the power of great ideas to transform our way of thinking and to imagine the world both as a record and as a possibility. Hay has hosted notable figures including Desmond Tutu, Nadine Gordimer, John Irving, Jim Watson, Wangari Maathai, Seamus Heaney, Mario Vargas Llosa, Paul Nurse, Shirin Ebadi and Bill Clinton, who memorably described Hay as ‘The Woodstock of the Mind’.